A Kickstarter campaign is now underway for Torment: Tides of Numenera, offering the promised chance to support this single-player RPG that developer inXile entertainment intends to "continue the thematic legacy of the critically acclaimed Planescape: Torment." The announcement explains that inXile is choosing crowd funding again so soon after overwhelming successes of their Wasteland 2 Kickstarter with great purpose, saying they have "chosen to abandon the traditional publisher-developer business model and focus on crowdsourcing for upcoming projects, beginning with Torment." Here's word on the game they are seeking $900K to develop:

Torment: Tides of Numenera will be a single-player role-playing game, distributed DRM-free for Windows (PC), Mac, and Linux. It will be available in English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. Torment will continue the thematic legacy of the critically acclaimed Planescape: Torment™ by having to face complex and nuanced morality decisions, carefully contemplating deep and reactive choices with consequences that echo throughout the game all the while immersed into a new and strange vision taken from by renowned designer and writer Monte Cook's new tabletop role-playing game, Numenera™.

In Torment: Tides of Numenera, players will have to decide for themselves the answer to the eternal question, what does one life matter? Numenera's Ninth World is a fantastic vision of a world in which massive civilizations continue to rise and fall with only cities, monuments, and artifacts left behind to serve as reminders of their past existence. These reminders have become part of the accumulated detritus of eons and now this assortment of ancient power, called the numenera, is there for the taking. One of these humans has discovered a way to harness the numenera to grow strong, to cheat death, to skip across the face of centuries in a succession of bodies. But he discovers an unexpected side effect: You.

InBlack wrote on Mar 7, 2013, 07:06:Im looking forward more to Project Eternity than this game. Somehow a Torment game without the Planescape setting just makes no sense to me...

Yes, I will miss the Planescape setting too… but with some of the people responsible for Planescape on board, such as former TSR/Wizards of the Coast senior designer, Monte Cook… I wouldn’t worry too much.

Optional Nickname! wrote on Mar 7, 2013, 12:22:To lose the fertile and vivid mental playground of Placescape is disappointing at the very least and action should be taken to be able to secure that IP away from those who don't wish to share it.

What kinda action were you imagining? Waiting 100 years?

That's inaction, the opposite of what I would be recommending.

One possible action is to negotiate with Hasbro, another is to use Planescape without Hasbro. There are other alternatives which I'm sure you can intuit easily.

Optional Nickname! wrote on Mar 7, 2013, 12:22:To lose the fertile and vivid mental playground of Placescape is disappointing at the very least and action should be taken to be able to secure that IP away from those who don't wish to share it.

InBlack wrote on Mar 7, 2013, 07:06:Im looking forward more to Project Eternity than this game. Somehow a Torment game without the Planescape setting just makes no sense to me...

I too have very strong opinions about the Planescape setting and how famously Torment used that setting. I don't think many people fully appreciate the decades of internally consistent lore and imaginative depths that Planescape encompasses.

Not only does it cover Sigil, the Spired many doored hub of the multi-verse but it covers the outer planes, inner planes and their variants. The Prime Material plane, the Ethereal plane, the Astral plane and many of its denizens and dieties.

The Blood War, Limbo, Mechanus, Pit Fiends, Archons, The Happy Hunting Grounds, Elementals and Summoning Spells, all are part of Planescape in one way or another.

D&D and its expansion settings rival Middle-Earth in breadth, depth and longevity including commercial viability. To lose the fertile and vivid mental playground of Placescape is disappointing at the very least and action should be taken to be able to secure that IP away from those who don't wish to share it.

No matter how wonderful this new setting might be (considering the authors) it will not have the years and years of established lore supporting it out the gate. Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro have some explaining to do, or are they too busy playing Pokemon?

D4rkKnight wrote on Mar 7, 2013, 03:04:Voice acting every line of dialogue gets you Skyrim - an action rpg. When you pay for every spoken word you cut down the content to a bare minimum. Thank god for text-based RPG's.

Yep. David Gaider actually did a really interesting series of blogs about writing an RPG. It's pretty long, but well worth the read (even if you dislike David Gaider): Clicky Clicky!

One of the things he addresses is the "Word Budget" and how it's pretty well hardcoded for areas, characters, encounters, etc. Did you go over? Sucks to be you, go back and remove words until it fits.

And all that is because of the cost associated with voice overs. A Text RPG has no such issues. Want the wizened old wizard to have enough dialogue to dwarf War and Peace? Go right ahead.

Dev wrote on Mar 7, 2013, 06:10:I'm actually impressed that it will only take $2 million to do all the stuff that's planned so far.

No middle management. No bloated structures where the descision on, for example, how to make doors open in the game requires half a dozen meetings and waiting 'till the descision process wanders up the chain of command and down again while several dozen artists and programmers sit idle, not being able do anything, only producing expenses while they are waiting.

Compare this to Project Eternity, where the main programmer just implemented this feature in a few hours, because he can make such detail descisions for himself.

THAT is the reason why majors are no longer able to produce games on a moderate budget. And comparing the visuals and production value of a game like THE WITCHER 2 with DA2 or Skyrim and realising that TW2 had a budget of only 10-15 mio. dollars ...

Oh I know and I agree. And there's other factors too, like marketing sometimes taking as much money as the game itself.And knowing doesn't do anything to make me less impressed

netnerd85 wrote on Mar 7, 2013, 06:27:@Dev come up for air once in a while

Not going to bother with a "real" reply since you have made so many assumptions. Hope you enjoy your well thought out story, as long as you enjoy.

Yes I did make a number of them. But then you didn't have much in the way of detail there . Feel free to elucidate your thoughts, and if I was wrong, I'll apologize.Edit:

netnerd85 wrote on Mar 7, 2013, 11:56:lol, "rewarding"... hook line and sinker for you then ey

Incentive for the rat to do as master demands.

Given your comment in the other torment thread, and lack of further response here, pretty sure I didn't misinterpret.

Dev wrote on Mar 7, 2013, 06:10:I'm actually impressed that it will only take $2 million to do all the stuff that's planned so far.

No middle management. No bloated structures where the descision on, for example, how to make doors open in the game requires half a dozen meetings and waiting 'till the descision process wanders up the chain of command and down again while several dozen artists and programmers sit idle, not being able do anything, only producing expenses while they are waiting.

Compare this to Project Eternity, where the main programmer just implemented this feature in a few hours, because he can make such detail descisions for himself.

THAT is the reason why majors are no longer able to produce games on a moderate budget. And comparing the visuals and production value of a game like THE WITCHER 2 with DA2 or Skyrim and realising that TW2 had a budget of only 10-15 mio. dollars ...

netnerd85 wrote on Mar 7, 2013, 05:43:I don't get it, it's like the other extreme.

"Give us money money money and you get 'deeper story'"

Doing a deeper story takes resources like time and *gasp* money. Did you even bother to look at the stretch goals in the latest update?KS stretch goal update

[1.2 Million][...] we have already passed what would have been our first Stretch Goal and are excited to announce that, though you will play Torment as a specific character, we will provide you with the choice to choose your character’s gender when you begin a playthrough.

Besides the obvious impacts of PC gender (e.g., character model, animations, increased localization work for languages for which gender matters, etc.), there will be appropriate reactivity from NPCs in the game world. This doesn’t mean that the overarching story will depend on your gender, but the level of reactivity will be significant and noticeable.

ZOMG, wait wait, having to do double the main character modeling and animations and writing a bunch of extra dialog... isn't that like automatically done by tools nowadays? Isn't that just free? And instantly rendered?

$2.0 Million: Monte Writes, Mark Composes, and Goo OozesWe will continue to increase Torment’s story depth and reactivity as Monte Cook also joins our writing team, contributing directly to in-game content.[...]At this Stretch Goal, Mark Morgan will write more music for Torment to complement the additional game areas and content we will be adding. Furthermore, he will incorporate a live orchestra into his work.[...]Our initial plans for Torment included four possible companions for the player and at this Stretch Goal, we will be adding a fifth, which we’ve nicknamed “The Toy.” (That’s not its in-game name. ) The Toy is a changing ball of goo: Is it a pet, an abandoned toy, a dangerous weapon? Whatever it is, it responds to the way you treat it by changing its appearance and abilities to reflect what it perceives as your desires.

Wait, I thought things like live orchestras and hiring original planescape composer was free?Plus, isn't hiring someone to closely work on the writing, instead of just consulting, shouldn't that be free too? I mean ZOMG how dare people expect to be paid for their time. Surely they can just move back in with their parents so they won't have living expenses.And another party member that has multiple appearances and animations, surely thats like done all by unity automagically when you type "MAKE ME ANOTHER PARTY NPC KTHX BAI"

I know its a huge shock that scaling up a game design with more features takes more money, but there it is. And they've clearly delineated what people will get with the additional resources. They haven't just said "it will be better, trust us, we won't say how, but it will hahahah"I'm actually impressed that it will only take $2 million to do all the stuff that's planned so far.